Saint Patrick’s Day, celebrated on March 17, is a Christian holiday that celebrates Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland.
Saint Patrick was an evangelizer of Ireland. The legend tells that he would have driven all the snakes out of the country, symbolizing the conversion of the Irish people.
The festival is already celebrated by the Irish since the 9th and 10th centuries. It became a legal holiday in the Irish calendar on March 16, 1607. Saint Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in Ireland.
Saint Patrick’s Day is progressively become a civil holiday, symbol of recognition for all Irish people. It is in the United States, in Boston, that the first celebration of this holiday took place in 1737. The first official parade took place in New York in 1762. In Ireland, the first Saint Patrick’s Day parade took place in Dublin in 1931.
In the 1990s, the Irish government began a campaign to associate Saint Patrick’s Day with a festival to promote Irish culture. The government forms a group called the Saint Patrick Festival, which has the aim of :
- offer a national festival that ranks among the largest celebrations in the world
- to create energy and excitement across Ireland through innovation, creativity, investment and commercial activity
- provide an opportunity and motivation for people of Irish origin to assist and join in imaginative and expressive celebrations
- to project, internationally, a fair image of Ireland as a creative, professional and sophisticated country.
The first Saint Patrick Festival took place on March 17, 1996. The festival stretches on 5 days. The event progressively became more secular. Saint Patrick’s Day is celebrated not only by the Irish, but also by cities all over the world, including Buenos Aires (Argentina), New York (USA) and Montreal (Canada). The festival is characterized by the color green and symbols of Irish culture. During this celebration you must wear green clothes, assist at parades and festivals, and consume Irish food and drink.
N.N
